by A. C. Wise
That hitching, broken sound. Like gears in a machine struggling to catch. Like a baby’s cry. A wounded animal. Henry jerks, his body instinctively trying to flee. His head strikes the window and pain blooms in his forehead above his right eye.
“Are you—”
Concern tinges Paul’s voice, but Henry barely hears it. The sound has hooks beneath his skin, wanting to drag him in among the trees.
“Turn here.” Henry bites the words out through the pain, the song filling him up until there’s no space left for breath.
Paul looks at him askance but flicks the turn signal, putting them on a road that quickly gives way to gravel and dust. The trees grow closer here, their branches whip-thin, the same ones he saw in the corrupted clip of their film.
“Pull over.”
Henry’s breath comes easier now, the pain fading to a dull ache like a bruise. The cicada song forms an undercurrent, less urgent but not completely gone. Paul kills the engine. His expression is full of concern. Henry wants to thank him for his trust, but whatever waits for them in the woods is no cause for either of them to be thankful.
He climbs out of the car, buries his hands in his pockets, and walks. Leaves crunch as Paul trots behind him. Nervous energy suffuses the air between. Henry hears the questions Paul wants to ask, held trapped behind his teeth. It’s nothing Henry can explain, so he keeps walking, head down.
When Henry stops, it’s so sudden Paul almost trips. Tree branches cross the sky in the exact configuration Henry saw in the film, only the angle is wrong. Henry should be seeing them from lower down. From the height of a child.
The burr of cicadas grows louder, the steady drone rising to an ecstatic yell. Henry forces himself to keep his eyes on the trees, turning to walk backward. He pictures a girl being led through the trees, a man’s hand clamped on her upper arm. Her death waits for her among the trees, and so does a camera on a tripod.
Henry is thirteen years old again, listening to the crying girl, lost and frightened and in pain. The hours after her discovery blur in his mind, though certain moments stand out sharp as splinters beneath his skin. The scent of leaf rot and dirt, his cheek pressed to the forest floor. His parents lifting him bodily out of the way as the rescue crew arrived, and Henry scrabbling at the earth, refusing to let go, terrified of leaving the girl alone.
He remembers seeing the girl’s face for the first time but not what she looked like. In his mind, her features are as blurred and indistinct as they were at the bottom of the hole—eyes and mouth dark wounds opened in her pale skin.
There were endless questions from his parents, from the rescue crew—how had he found the girl, did he see her fall, was it an accident, did someone hurt her? They called Henry a hero, and he wanted none of it. He remembers burying himself under the blankets on the bottom bunk in the cabin, wishing he could stay there for years like a cicada, only emerging with everyone long gone.
Now, as then, the insect song times itself to the blood pounding like a headache in Henry’s skull. He’s sharply aware of Paul watching him, eyes wide, as Henry stops and turns around.
The shack is half-hidden in the trees, scarcely bigger than a garden shed. There’s a catch in Paul’s breath, and Henry glances over to see Paul’s hand go to his service revolver.
The door isn’t locked, but it sticks, warped with weather and clogged with leaves. Henry holds his breath, expecting a stench, expecting a horror movie jump scare, but there’s nothing inside but more dead leaves and a pile of filthy rags. A small wooden mallet rests up against one wall.
Paul uses a flashlight to sweep the room, even though they can see every corner from the door. A seam in the floor catches the light, and once Paul points it out, Henry can’t unsee it. Paul kneels, prying up boards with a kind of frantic energy, using the edge of a penknife.
“It’s another tape.” Paul straightens. There’s dirt under his nails.
“He killed more than one person.” Henry swallows against a sour taste at the back of his throat. He knew, the moment he saw the corrupted bit of film, the moment he heard the cicadas scream, but he’d wanted desperately to be wrong.
Paul holds the tape in a handkerchief, turning it so Henry can see the handwritten label—Exsanguination.
“I brought my camcorder. It’s in the car.” Henry feels the beginning of tremors, starting in the soles of his feet and working their way up his spine. Adrenaline. Animal fear. Some intuition made him pack film equipment before leaving the house, and Henry loathes that part of himself now.
Back in the car, Paul runs the heater, even though there’s barely a chill in the air. Sweat builds inside Henry’s sweatshirt as he fumbles with the tape, wearing the cotton gloves Paul gave him to preserve fingerprints. He flips the camcorder’s small screen so they can both see, but hesitates a moment before hitting play, as if that could change the outcome. Henry knows all movies are ghost stories, frozen slices of time, endlessly replayed. Whatever will happen has already happened. The only thing he and Paul can do is witness it.
Static shoots across the screen, then the image steadies. The girl can’t be more than ten years old. Her hair is very long and hangs over her shoulder in a braid. She stands in the center of the shack, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Dim light comes through a single grimy window. She shivers.
A man in a bulky jacket and ski mask steps into frame. He picks up the mallet leaned against the wall in the shed, now in a plastic evidence bag in the back of Paul’s car, and he methodically breaks every one of the girl’s fingers.
The image cuts, then the man and girl are outside. The camera sits on a tripod, watching as the man leads the girl to the spot framed by two stubby trees. The girl is barefoot. She sobs, a sound of pure exhaustion that reminds Henry of the little girl in the hole. This girl’s ankles are tied. Her hands free, but useless, her fingers all wrong angles, pulped and shattered.
The man unbraids the girl’s hair. He employs the same care he used breaking her fingers. Once it’s unbound, it hangs well past the middle of her back. The man lifts and winds strands of it into the spindly branches of the trees growing behind her, creating a wild halo of knots and snarls and twigs.
The girl cannot flee when the man pulls out a knife. She thrashes, a panicked, trapped animal, but the knots of her hair hold her fast. He cuts. Long slashes cover her exposed thighs, her knees, her calves, her arms.
How long does it take a person to bleed to death? Henry and Paul are about to find out.
After what seems like an eternity, long after the girl has stopped struggling, the man steps out of frame. The camera watches as the trees bow, the girl slumps. Branches crack, freeing strands of her hair, but far too late.
Henry gets the door open just as bile and black coffee hits the back of his throat. He heaves and spits until his stomach is empty. Paul places a hand on his back, the only point of warmth in a world gone freezing cold. Henry leans back into the car, and Paul puts his arms around Henry, holding him until the shaking stops.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”
The expression on Paul’s face when he says it is a blow to Henry’s freshly emptied gut. The pain in Paul’s eyes is real, yes, but what accompanies it isn’t quite regret. Instead, guilt underlies the pain, and Paul’s gaze shifts away.
In that moment, Henry knows that Paul wouldn’t change a thing if he could. He would still ask Henry to watch the tape, no matter how many times the scenario replayed. This death, among every other he’s witnessed, is too big to hold alone. He needs to share the burden with someone, and that someone couldn’t be Maddy. Because that kind of death spreads like rot, corrupting everything it touches, like it corrupted Henry and Paul’s film, their past, their shared dream. Henry understands.
If Paul shared that pain with Maddy, it would become the only thing he would see anytime he looked at her, and the only thing he could do to save himself would be to let her go. And Maddy isn’t someone Paul is willing to le
t go.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says again.
“Me too.” Henry reaches for the passenger-side door and pulls it closed. He can’t look at Paul. His face aches, like a headache in every part of his skull at once. Paul shifts the car into drive.
“Are you…” Paul’s words fall into the silence after they’ve been driving for a few moments, but he stops, as if realizing the inappropriateness of what he was about to say.
Henry hears the words anyway. “Are you seeing anyone now?” Bitterness rises to the back of his throat, even though his stomach is empty. Paul could have asked the question any time during the drive, if he really wanted to know, if the question was genuine curiosity and not born of guilt. Paul asked Henry to share his burden, and now it hurts him to think that Henry might have to carry it alone in turn. Henry hears the words even when Paul doesn’t say them, his golden ear catching sounds no one else ever would.
“I hope you find someone,” Paul says finally as he pulls back onto the road. “You shouldn’t be alone. No one should.”
Henry knows what Paul is saying; he should find someone to share his burden, too. Henry can’t imagine someone loving him enough to take on that kind of pain; he can’t imagine ever wanting someone to. He knows what that kind of love feels like from the other side.
The heater makes a struggling, wheezing sound, and Paul switches it off, rolling his window down. Air roars through the cabin, and cold sweat dries on Henry’s skin. If it weren’t for Henry’s golden ear, the wind would swallow Paul’s next words whole.
“I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.”
*
It’s a good two days before Henry brings himself to check the other clips he shot with Paul. The rot has spread to every single one of them. There’s an open barn door looking out onto a barren field, rising up to block the buildings of Manhattan, a water stain on a ceiling spreading to cover the boy’s face as he gets his first glimpse of the city, a crack of light under a closet door instead of the flickering gap between subway trains. Each new image is a hole punched in an already fragile structure, unwinding it even more.
Henry understands what the scenes are now, after watching Exsanguination. They are films made by ghosts, the last image each of the killer’s victims saw before they died. What he doesn’t understand is why he is seeing them. Is it because he had the misfortune to hear what shouldn’t have been there for him to hear? The cicadas, linking him to the woman whose last sight was of trees through a grimy window. Her death linking him to the deaths of the other ghosts.
Henry shakes himself, thinking of his and Paul’s drive home from their aborted attempt to find answers. Awkward silence reigned until Henry stood outside the car, looking in through the driver’s window at Paul. Then their fragmentary sentences had jumbled on top of each other.
“You don’t have to—” from Paul.
And, “Next time you go—” from Henry.
Standing there, trying not to shiver, Henry had extracted a promise.
“Call me before you go looking. I mean it. I’m coming with you.” He almost said, whether you like it or not, but Henry knows it isn’t a matter of like; it’s a matter of need. He saw the gratitude in Paul’s eyes and his self-loathing underneath it, hating the fact that he should need to ask Henry to do this thing, that he should be too cowardly to refuse and demand Henry stay home. One way or another, they will both see this through to the end.
Henry doesn’t tell Paul about the images corrupting their film. But he watches them again, obsessively, alone, until each is imprinted on his eyelids. His dreams are full of doorways and trees and slivers of light. At the end of the week, Paul finally calls, his voice weary and strained.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Paul says.
Henry barely lets him get the words out before saying, “I’ll be ready.”
*
They drive away from the city. Henry’s stomach is heavy with dread and the sense of déjà vu. He clenches his jaw, already braced for the sound of cicadas, and speaks without looking Paul’s way.
“We’re looking for a house with a barn.”
From the corner of his eye, Henry sees Paul half turn to him, a question and confusion giving a troubled look to his eyes. But he doesn’t ask out loud, and Henry doesn’t explain. They drive in relative silence until they reach the first railroad crossing on Paul’s map, intending to circle outward from there.
It takes Henry some time to realize that the sound he’s been bracing for has been there all along, a susurrus underlying the tire hum and road noise, a constant ache at the base of his skull. How long has he been listening to the cicadas? How long have they been driving?
Fragments of conversation reach him. He realizes Paul has been asking questions, and he’s been answering them, but he has no sense of the words coming from his mouth, or even any idea what they’re talking about. Suddenly the noise in his head spikes and with it, the pain. Henry grinds his teeth so hard he swears his molars will crack.
“Here.” The word has the same ticking, struggling quality as the cicada’s distress call.
Henry is thirteen years old again, wanting to clap his hands over his ears, wanting to crawl away from the sound.
“What—”
“Turn here.” Henry barks the words, harsh, and Paul obeys, the car fishtailing as Paul slews them onto a long, narrow drive. The drive rises, and when they crest the hill, Henry catches sight of a farmhouse. Paul stops the car. From this vantage point, Henry can just make out the roof of a barn where the land dips down again.
Henry is first out of the car, placing one hand against the hood to steady himself. He closes his eyes, and listens. He’s queasy, breathing shallowly, but there, as if simply waiting for him to arrive, the mournful, unspooling call of a train sounds in the distance.
“You hear it, too, right?” Henry opens his eyes, finally turning to Paul.
Paul inclines his head, the barest of motions. He looks shaken in a way Henry has never seen before.
“This is the place.” Henry opens his eyes, moving toward the front door.
A sagging porch wraps around the house on two sides. To the right, straggly trees stretch toward the sky. Without having to look, Henry knows there is a basement window looking up at those trees.
Paul draws his service revolver. The sound of him knocking is the loudest thing Henry has ever heard. When there’s no answer, Paul tries the knob. It isn’t locked. Paul leads and Henry follows, stepping into the gloom of an unlit hallway. The stench hits Henry immediately, and he pulls his shirt up over his nose.
Stairs lead up to the left. Rooms open from the entryway on either side, filled with sheet-covered furniture and windows sealed over with plywood boards. Paul climbs the stairs, and again, Henry follows. Up here, the scent is worse. There are brownish smears on the wall, as if someone reached out a bloody hand to steady themselves and left the blood to dry.
At the top of the stairs and to the left is a door bearing a full bloody handprint. It hangs partially open, and Paul nudges it open the rest of the way. Henry’s view is over Paul’s shoulder, not even fully stepped into the room, and even that is too much.
The corpse on the bed is partially decomposed, lying on rumpled sheets nearly black with filth. There are no flies, the body is too far gone for that, but Henry hears them anyway, the ghostly echo of their buzz. But just because the flies are gone doesn’t mean there aren’t other scavengers. A beetle crawls over the man’s foot.
Henry bolts down the stairs before he realizes it, back in the kitchen where unwashed dishes pile on the countertops, with more in the sink. Garbage fills the bin by the door. The air here smells sour, but after the room upstairs, it’s almost a relief.
Henry thinks of the wrecked car, and imagines the killer somehow pulling himself from the wreck, somehow managing to make it back home, only to die here, bleeding out the way the girl in the woods did. He wants to feel satisfaction for the strange twist of justice, but there’s only sickness, and ben
eath that, a hollow still needing to be filled.
Henry turns toward the basement door. It seems to glare back at him until he makes himself cross the room and open it. Wooden steps, the kind built with boards that leave gaps of darkness between, lead down.
He finds a light switch, but he doesn’t bother. Light filters in from the high basement window. It matches the light on the tape where the woman breathed and died and so it is enough.
Beneath the window, a pipe rises from the unfinished floor. There’s a tripod aimed at the pipe, a camera sitting on the tripod, the compartment where the tape was ejected standing open. At the base of the pipe, there are marks on the floor. When Henry bends close to see, they resolve into words. Find me.
Henry’s breath emerges in a whine. For once, his ears fail him. He doesn’t hear Paul descending the stairs until Paul is beside him, touching his shoulder. Henry can’t bring himself to look up. He can’t even bring himself to stand. He stays crouched where he is, swaying slightly. When he does finally look up, it isn’t at Paul, it’s at the window. On the other side of the dirty glass, stark, black branches crisscross the gray sky. Henry looks at them for a very long time. And he breathes.
*
There are twelve more tapes. They arrive in a padded envelope, each one labeled like the originals, copies written in Paul’s hand—Exhalation 1–9, Contusion, Asphyxiation, and Delirium. Henry didn’t ask, but Paul knew he would need to see them. Even so, it’s several weeks before Henry can bring himself to watch.
In Asphyxiation, a man hangs from the rafters of the barn, slowly strangling to death under his own weight. In Contusion, a little boy is beaten within in an inch of his life and locked in a dark closet, only the faintest sliver of light showing underneath the door. In Delirium, an old man is strapped to a bed, injected with a syringe, and left to scream out his life with only the water spot on the ceiling for company.